The Lies They Tell
by a.k.a.-ashley
Summary: She's living a lie that she can't escape from.


**The Lies They Tell**

**Chapter 1/1**

**Author's Note**: This fic is just something that popped into my head. Needless to say this season of One Tree Hill has been a huge disappointment to me, and while I still love who these two characters used to be, I just can't watch anymore. So Veronica Mars has become my drug of choice on Tuesdays. I'm still going to continue to write L/P fics, but I just felt like getting that all off of my chest.

* * *

It's a lie.

She knows that voice in the back of her head telling her that very thing is probably right. At night when she's pretending to sleep, she can feel the unwanted presence of Jake next to her. In her bed. She couldn't specifically remember asking him to move all of his possessions, including his baby daughter, into her already crowded room. It just seemed to have happened.

One day her room is covered in random pieces of art, unopened imports from the record store and dirty laundry. Now there's a crib and Jake's suitcase opened on her desk chair, discarded baby bottles on her nightstand and the faint smell of used diapers in her wastebasket.

Brooke teases her about it and calls her "Mama Peyton". The nickname causes her to cringe, two months ago Brooke would have noticed such a reaction but she's different now, they're both different.

She wonders how long Jake expects to stay, if he's even thought about that at all.

It was fun at first, she supposes. She didn't have to be lonely in her cold, empty house. And there had been a time when she had genuinely missed Jake being around, and having him stay with her seemed like a good, albeit impulsive, decision. He'd just shown up out of the blue, with a message from Lucas saying she needed some help. And so she'd welcomed him with open arms.

She had needed help, Lucas had been right about that. But she hadn't expected it to come from Jake. When Lucas had shown up at her house that day and she'd told him in not so many words that she needed her friends around, she had meant that she needed him. She needed Lucas, someone who understood her, and even though he was never around anymore Lucas was the one who had fit that description at one time. But he'd misinterpreted her words, her signals, and sent for Jake to come pick up the pieces.

Jake had been pretty useless in the help department, not that it was entirely his fault, Jenny took up most of his free time. But he had come to help her, yet she was the one who ended up watching Jenny while he looked for work or whatever it was he did for hours during the day. She was the one who gave his daughter a bath when he fell asleep on her couch after dinner that she had scrounged together.

She had known before Jake had left for Savannah that first time that he had feelings for her, he'd never admitted as much but she could tell. And when he came back the feelings were obviously still there. It didn't come as much of a shock when he had kissed her that first time. Things progressed from there, Peyton hadn't bothered to put a stop to any of it. She may not have loved Jake but she was a girl who needed a little physical contact.

She didn't realize that she was holding onto her feelings for Lucas until she saw him at lunch one day. His gaze was fixed intently on something across the commons area, her eyes followed his gaze and she had wondered then what the strange sensation she had felt in her stomach was when she saw that he was staring at Brooke. He was still in love with Brooke, and that realization had devastated her more than she had imagined.

That night was the first time she and Jake had sex. She had come home from school and thrown her bookbag across the living room. She was angry with herself for still loving Lucas and with Lucas for still loving Brooke, and Jake was just there and she didn't want to think about anything anymore. There was no foreplay, no longing glances, at least not on her part. She'd kept the lights off as to avoid seeing any adoring looks Jake might give her. When they finished she slid out of bed and walked wordlessly to the bathroom and took a shower.

There are times when she looks at Jake and is so angry that he doesn't get what is going on that she just wants to scream at him. Scream that she doesn't love him, that she doesn't even like him all that much. But she's not that horrible of a person to actually tell him that, instead she just thinks it in her mind, tucking it away safely for a day when she actually becomes that horrible of a person.

She doesn't want to be this person anymore, the girl who's living a lie, playing house with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend or whatever the hell he was to her. She doesn't want to be Jenny's permanent babysitter. She doesn't want to love Lucas anymore, she knows it's stupid and immature but she half blames him for all of this. If he wasn't so god damnn oblivious, if he could just get over Brooke, she wouldn't be dealing with any of this.

What the hell is so special about Brooke anyways? She wonders this at night a lot lately. Even as young girls, boys had loved Brooke because she wore her shirts tight and always had an ample supply of cherry lip-gloss smeared on her lips. She knew what boys wanted and didn't care that other girls thought of her as easy or slutty. As long as the boys loved her, that was all that ever mattered. And Lucas, the one boy Peyton had thought would see right through Brooke's shallowness, had fallen for her.

So she blames Jake for being weak and oblivious, she blames Lucas for being like every other boy and a disappointment, she blames Brooke for being Brooke, she blames her mom for running that red light and leaving behind an emotionally stunted daughter. But mostly she blames herself for continuing the lie.


End file.
